


night work

by ninemoons42



Series: l'amoureux [1]
Category: Penny Dreadful (TV), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Background Chirrut/Baze - Freeform, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Demon-Possessed Jyn, Demonic Possession, F/M, Families of Choice, Gothic, Introspection, Kissing, M/M, Supernatural Elements, Team as Family, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Werewolf Cassian, Werewolves, background spiritassassin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 11:00:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12079737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Cassian Andor, part-time werewolf and really not wanting anyone to know it, falls in with a group of men -- and one woman -- who are hunting the monsters that go bump in the night.Here's the catch: he falls in love with the woman.There are many, many problems related to that, and the only thing he knows for sure is that she loves him as well.





	night work

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Lovers: Terra Incognita](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4878520) by [Jean Genie (LetYourselfGo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LetYourselfGo/pseuds/Jean%20Genie). 



> I blame this fusion entirely on a recent visit to one of my favorite bars. Great cocktails, great cool atmosphere (this was on a humid night before the big storm hit this week), and _Penny Dreadful_ Season 1 playing on silent on a large flatscreen TV.
> 
> I loved that series and now I need to marathon Season 3 and be done with the whole thing.
> 
> But I still love Ethan and Vanessa and all the others, and so: this crossover now makes a little more sense, at least in my mind. XD

“Why, Master Andor, going to bed before supper?”

He stops, halfway up the stairs, and he thinks that the longer he stands frozen on the step the more he feels the very nap of the velvet carpet beneath his boots, the grain of the wooden banister beneath his shaking hand, the quiet strange creaking of the walls themselves as the house settles into the dipping temperatures of the night.

Heavy, heavy, far too much to bear: the leather of his duster and the belts clasped around his middle, not to mention three guns in their holsters and seven knives in their various scabbards. Ammunition all over, and the set of thick gloves wrapped around the doubled thicknesses of sailcloth and deer pelt in one of the innermost pockets. The bandanna he wears around his neck so as not to bare his throat to anyone or for anything. 

“Do you feel as though you must punish yourself by going without your usual victuals? But we could hardly name you truant.”

He takes a deep breath, and doesn’t turn around, since the man with the cloud-shrouded eyes and the tall white staff standing at the bottom of the stairs doesn’t need to see his face. “I was caught short with hunger while I was going about my day’s tasks,” he lies. “So I took the liberty of eating, before I could return here.”

“Then I would like to invite you to tea. We have just brought in a fine first flush from Ceylon.”

Some teas are musky, others are fruity, and still others are flowery, and they all give off such a rich thick waft of the good earth they are grown in, and he’s developed a fondness for some of the many varieties on offer in this house.

But he can feel that maddening itch creeping along his nerves and sinews, living quiescent in his bones night after night until it becomes a beast with a life of its own in the silvering light of the ascending waxing moon, and right now it is all he can do not to try and claw that pain out of his own skin.

So he grits his teeth and hunches over and, gods, it’s too warm and he’s going to start howling any moment now. “I -- thank you for your generosity, Sir Chirrut. I shall join you in the morning, fates willing,” and he knows he’s turning tail, he knows he’s fleeing, rattling up the stairs and he can smell the sharp scent of the other man’s hurt. 

But he pounds his way up to one of the smallest bedrooms in the house. Walls quilted and buttoned in pale green chintz, and a bed sized for a little girl in her pinafores, and the beddings stripped of their lace and their embroidery at his own request: still he throws his weapons into one corner and his duster onto the plain cream-colored counterpane, and he can’t shed his clothes quickly enough -- better to tear them with human hands, better than taking out a loan from his unexpected benefactors in order to buy new -- he can’t wait a second too long and lose every scrap -- 

The world blurs out around him for a moment: but he can still tell apart all of the shapes in the dim-lit gloom of the chamber. An armchair and a small settee and a table that still holds the faint traces of tea-party scents and spring flowers, though the graceful circles of lace and tatting have long since been packed away into storage. An empty closet surrounded by half a dozen equally empty bookshelves, though he can still smell the musty sweetness of well-thumbed book leather, and he can imagine hearing the crinkling of gilt-edged book pages. Sulfur and plant-scents, the compounded smell of iron-gall ink -- a potpourri of powder-scents and flower-wafts, milk and pound cake and white bread, the cheerful detritus of a very young woman -- 

One glaring omission from the room and its arrangements, however: windows. One of the young ladies of the house must have been particularly susceptible to drafts, or so he thinks he remembers from Sir Chirrut’s quiet stories. The same susceptibility must account for the size of the fireplace that takes up the entire wall nearest the bed: enough for three large logs to be stacked together, burning in a soothing blaze that could last for a day and a night and even longer.

That fireplace is empty, scrubbed of even the caked-on ashes and soot of the years of its use, and he curls up in its maw now: where the brick and the stone cannot be damaged by hands or feet or claws or teeth.

And he doesn’t see the moon as it breaks free from the clouds and the fog of the daylight hours, but he doesn’t need to see it: he can feel its tides in his blood, raging, building like a long lonely scream, like sharp edges and pain -- 

It isn’t the first time that he weeps as the change comes over him, nor the first time that he curses the man who placed this foul burden on him -- he was a victim, and he had turned so many others into his own victims in the wretched continuation of his existence -- 

The last thing that Cassian Andor smells before his human senses and his human mind are temporarily snuffed out: the sharp tang of sulfur, like too many struck matches, like the wick of a candle, its flame guttering and shivering under the onslaught of an oncoming rainstorm -- 

*

He knows that there will be questions, once again, when he emerges from this night of secreting himself away. Deep raking wounds scratched anew into his own flanks. Weakness, and a nearly bottomless hunger and thirst, thankfully transmuted from that singular craving for raw flesh. Long gone are the days when he would mistakenly claw at his own face, his own features that would bear the stamps of his self-loathing in bleeding visibility: still, he thinks the men of this house might still notice the half-starved aspect he’ll no doubt see as the first thing on his own face, when he can bear to look at it again.

A clock outside his door chimes, again. This time he hears three chimes.

He also hears a soft creak, and barefooted steps. The whisk-whisk of fabric moving against fabric and against skin.

Human breaths, and the beat of a human heart, pausing just outside his door.

He can almost feel the movements on the other side, just by smelling and hearing. Clean soap-scent of sheets. Acrid tears and the sweat produced by a restless night of tossing and turning. A hand curled into a graceful fist despite the years of slashing and a brief nightmare of thick stained restraints, poised to knock.

He holds his breath, and feels torn: would he open the door to that knock, or would he turn away?

But the next sound he hears is the rustle of a piece of paper. As good as a cleared throat, were there a man or a woman inclined to speak. 

That same smell of ink, lingering, on the scrap of paper that is slid into the crack between the door and the floor.

He waits for the footsteps to recede before he crawls toward the scrap.

Shaky handwriting.

_You are not alone in damming up your tears._

And he hangs his head.

Sorrow and pain and compassion and misery without bounds, and he also feels a sick sort of shame settling like millstones beneath his heart, for he gnaws on the picked-clean bones of his pain, and forgets that there are others who suffer: and that there is at least one of those other afflicted ones beneath the eaves of this ornate home.

*

He has to do up his buttons several times before he can be presentable. Dulled thoughts, dashed against the shores of hunger and the grinding fatigue of the previous night’s changes. The boots are a final challenge and he decides to finally forgo them, when he does manage to step out of his room. Boots against the unused bed, against all of his weapons save his first and oldest knife, its holster a familiar weight where it’s tucked into the waist of his trousers.

No one else seems to be stirring in this house, not hours before it must be sunrise.

But the lanterns are lit and one of the hearths is already going, when he makes it down into the wood and the cheerfully painted walls of the kitchen in the basement: he thinks he smells soup, and the fragrance of fresh bread, and he squints at the woman sitting at the long table.

“I do not cook, as you well know,” she says, without raising her eyes from the book next to her cup and saucer.

“I never know,” he makes himself quip. “Two nights ago we killed six vampires, and you took your foster-father’s sword and beheaded one of them with your own hands. I had thought that you preferred to fight these undead beings with -- your words.”

All this woman, this Jyn Erso, needs to fight off things like -- vampires, and it still chills his blood to say that word or even think it -- is the sheer power that she carries in her slight shoulders, in her scarred hands. Standing straight and stern and calm, just holding the hems of her skirts away from the blood and the viscera and the shrill dying screams: only her words, and whatever it is that lives within her. 

He knows that she hates that power and fears it, and he knows of the connection between that hatred and fear, and the brittleness of the smile on her face when she knows he’s looking at her.

Still: he dares. When he sits down at the table, he takes the seat at the foot, so he and she make an angle. 

Enough for him to touch her fingertips where they have gone still on her book with his own.

It means something to him that she starts, and stares at his hand in close proximity to her own, and does not move her hand away. 

“I would give you your words back,” he murmurs, “if you were willing to receive them.”

He feels the tremor that runs through her, magnified so the pages beneath her hand rustle, and he is nearly overwhelmed by the need to close the distance, to sweep her up into his arms and storm away from this kitchen -- 

And he doesn’t move, because she sobs. 

Once.

A small sound.

She knows all too well how to hide her cries, and that is only one of the things that she has in common with him.

It is she who moves, who takes one of his hands in both of her own, who draws his hand to her heart. 

Wordlessly she presses a kiss to his wrist, and wordlessly she places his hand back on the table from whence she had lifted it.

“I am more than willing to receive,” she says.

“I wish so very much to receive. I don’t know how I have come to find you,” she says.

“But you know what it is that stands between us.”

“I do.” Cassian closes his eyes.

Her cameo jewel is in place, pinned over her heart.

Not for the first time, he thinks the clear-crystal spider on its background of polished jet is hovering over its catch, over its prey. The beating heart of Jyn, big enough to love her protectors and her brilliant brave brother, big enough to mourn her lost mother and father, big enough to love him and his shadow-self with its massive teeth and claws perhaps.

But he closes his eyes and pays no attention to the tear that falls down his cheek, that splashes onto the tabletop.

*

Not the first time he’s cursed the fashion -- or perhaps some kind of obscure social need -- that requires him to go about with a hat. He hates having to think about it, to think about the fact that he’s got to hang on to it no matter what he happens to be doing, for fear of disgrace.

“People would think,” the man next to him grunts, “that losing a hat is a bigger social misstep than losing one’s own life.”

Cassian growls, and struggles to control his breathing, and he can see the wisping clouds of his exhalations in the fierce nip of the deepening night.

Arc of scattered stars in the sky, distant and cold and merely observing.

The moon’s extinguished crescent far behind Cassian’s shoulder.

So he can peer at his companion with clear and mocking eyes, and say, “You don’t seem to care.”

“You tell me, is there a reason I should?” The slight frame is swathed in an ill-fitting coat, ragged around the edges -- but it is trimmed with fur, and its plain epaulettes come up nearly past stubbled cheeks and sticking-out ears. Long dark hair, roughly trimmed, but clean. Oversized spectacles.

And Bodhi Rook will not carry anything so gauche as a sword, or even as a gun, though he’s surrounded by people carrying those weapons.

All the weapons he needs are in the satchel he’s carrying, the satchel that bulges, the satchel that makes strange clinking sounds with his every movement.

A call in the night: “Cassian! Bodhi! Over here!”

“Coming, Father,” Bodhi says, and as he starts forward, his coat flutters open for only an instant before he snatches at it again to keep the wind out.

Cassian shakes his head at the glimpse of the standing collar, the glimpse of the gleaming golden ornament at Bodhi’s throat.

Bodhi’s hand dips into the satchel, and comes up clutching a small glass vial, half-filled with clear water. He brushes the corked top against his mouth and gestures over it with his stiff, gloved hands -- then passes the vial over. “You’re going to need that right now.”

“Give me another,” is all Cassian says in response.

“And your gun?” Bodhi suddenly shakes his head. “That was a foolish question, forget I asked it.” Again the cork pressed to his mouth, words pressed quietly into the material, before he hands it over. “Ready?”

Cassian only draws one of his revolvers, and in a flash he’s got the whole thing cocked and ready to fire, and then he’s leaping forward.

He can hear Bodhi speaking now: or perhaps he is intoning, the words not actually familiar to Cassian’s ears, but the intent extremely so.

Prayers. Protections. Powers that be, invoked in the deep of the night.

And Cassian stops right where Jyn is staring at shadows, herself a shadow in the night in her mourning and her mannish coat, and mutters, “Lead me.”

She shakes her head, a minuscule movement in the night. “I will not lead you. I will not follow you.” Does she smile? The twitch of her mouth is brief and quickly gone, faster than even he can track it. “I will be by your side. And you may choose to remain at mine.”

“That’s not a hard choice to make at all,” he says, and self-consciously he brushes the hand carrying the glass vials against the brim of his hat, which also helps him hide his expression from her searching gaze.

But he thinks she understood him anyway, because she scoffs, light and not at all unkind, before she lifts one bare hand out to the night that begins to roil, that begins to pant, that begins to hiss.

Presences gathering behind him -- he doesn’t need to be concerned about them, not if the woman at his side isn’t. He needs to watch out for that which is ahead of him, that which the woman at his side is already drawing out, as though they were poison in the world.

When she takes a deep breath, when she begins to speak, the words are whispers that grow and grow in the mist and the warmth of standing shoulder to shoulder, and he fights the instinct to recoil. The instinct to turn away. Easier to fight those instincts now that this is no longer anywhere near his first rodeo with her, with the men at his back. 

All he has to do is to focus.

His gun. The recoil, and the timing between the shots, the timing so he can reload and then get back to the business of fighting next to Jyn. Glass bottles half-full of water: water like bullets, that carries the power to stop their enemies in their tracks.

When the fight begins, the world goes silent around Cassian, and he can’t even hear his own gun as it fires and fires and fires, six bullets and reload, six bullets and reload. He can’t hear it when Bodhi runs up to him, only feels the weight of more and more vials pressed into the hand that he isn’t shooting with. 

He can’t hear Jyn, hand out beside him, or the wind that tears at her hair and eventually pulls it free of the ribbon that normally keeps it in a neat tail. He can’t hear the words spilling from her mouth; he only knows that the languages she speaks in these encounters are not meant to be heard by sane ears, by living ears.

And he can see the creatures shrieking at her, see them shredding away into cold white nothing as she continues to speak.

The immense and terrifying weight of her voice, of the power in her voice, is what he feels, what he drinks in, with every breath.

*

Without the threat of the moon and its inexorable waxing, he can spend a sleepless night in a somewhat more social fashion: although in this case there are no words to respond to, nor no witticisms to parse and to respond to.

Only this: “When you’re tired of the tea.” 

A gesture at a cabinet in the corner of a small drawing room, with soothing dark blue on the walls, and a painting of a ship on the waves, only he still can’t understand the rigging of the paneled sails, broad horizontal lines as if to echo the beams of the frame.

And the man who made the gesture, who is standing over the massive desk, with a worn black-bound book under one arm.

Cassian looks up from the dregs in his teacup. “What do you recommend tonight?”

“Green bottle,” is the laconic reply.

Or maybe the reply is laconic because Sir Baze’s focus is on something else.

Cassian can’t help but get to his feet, can’t help but cross to the other side of the desk, for a closer look:

The instrument in Sir Baze’s hands is not his sword or his gun; it’s a brush. Black ink deep as the night, trailing from the tip. Every stroke is controlled and contained power, like feelings wrung out of the soul and given form on the yielding paper.

The only problem is that Cassian can’t read whatever is being written.

Sir Baze doesn’t seem to mind him for an audience, only continues to fill the sheet with writing, his features set in an odd serenity.

The more Cassian watches him work, the more he thinks he understands the way Jyn moves, in the thick of the work that they do at midnight. Not a movement is wasted, and not a breath without a specific purpose. A breath with which to speak, a breath with which to step, a breath with which to summon another kind of power. The curious lack of tension in the way she stands and sits: because she only looks like she’s ramrod-straight. The truth is that unless she’s swallowed up by her dark thoughts, she almost seems to lounge even when she’s sitting at her bureau, when she’s passing a plate at the table, when she’s standing in the shadow of a church and muttering prayers.

Sir Baze grunts, and picks up the piece of paper. Waves it gently in the air as though it were a piece of cloth, freshly rinsed. 

And then folds it into thirds before presenting it.

Cassian blinks. Takes the sheet automatically.

Before he can open his mouth to ask the necessary question, Sir Baze is already speaking. “You are still welcome to the contents of the liquor cabinet. And if you should have a request for something in particular, you have my word I’ll see about procuring it. But -- this,” and he points briefly at Cassian’s hand. “If you must consider it as a blessing, then do; if you believe you have no use for an old man’s wishes, you may dispose of it as you wish. But it is a prayer, or perhaps you might say an invocation.”

“Invocation,” and Cassian, without really thinking about it, presses the folded sheet to his heart.

Maybe he isn’t imagining the approval in Sir Baze’s eyes.

“For courage -- courage that lasts,” Sir Baze says. “Liquor’s courage lasts but a night. What you’ll need, for the work we do -- you’ll need something hardier.”

Footsteps, receding from him.

*

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

He knows he doesn’t start when Jyn speaks from very close by, but he also knows that his shoulders are starting to hurt.

He knew, he had that feeling churning his gut when Bodhi left, having received an urgent summons from a supplicant who was also a friend. When Sir Chirrut left with Sir Baze hot on his heels, called away by some kind of emergency at the dock where their ships came to call. 

Even the tall, officious man from a local group of scholars, who has been seeing some of their less macabre finds and contributing information, is not in evidence tonight.

The house is old and undeniably sturdy. Undeniably a place where its inhabitants feel safe.

But it won’t be safe if they’re attacked, tonight, without any hope of succor or assistance.

He’s sitting at the foot of the stairs, knees locked, hands cramping around a gun in one hand and a fine old sword -- on loan from Sir Chirrut -- when Jyn goes to put her back against the front door.

Cassian blinks, when he gets a good look at her eyes.

The green in her irises is draining away into black.

And he bolts to his feet and he can’t bring himself to raise his weapons -- 

Jyn smiles, and he doesn’t recognize her at all: not the flash of her teeth, not the loose fall of her hair, not the sway of her hips as she takes one step forward.

Cassian would very much like to start backing up the stairs, but he makes himself stand his ground. 

And is it his imagination, or is Jyn starting to cast a shadow? A strange shadow, that as he stares begins to grow, begins to loom over her. Begins to hiss and to croon, and the sound makes the hairs on the back of his head rise and bristle, makes his heart stutter -- once -- with fear.

“I know what you want,” Jyn, or rather the creature using Jyn, whispers. A whisper that fills up the house, that he thinks would shake the very walls down.

“Do you?” Cassian asks, and he doesn’t know how he’s talking back. “I don’t think so. Because what I want is you leaving her alone. Can you give me that?”

“Oh, but she didn’t tell you, did she?” that hateful voice says. “Did she leave out that part of the story? I cannot blame her. The story sounds so much better when I tell it.”

“Tell it to someone who cares.”

“How is that not you? I see the way you look at her. I see the way you turn towards her. If she walks into a room you point toward her no matter what direction you face. If she walks away from you you don’t move away until long after she’s gone. I see you, you know. I see you. And I can give her to you.”

“I know for a fact that’s something you can’t do,” he says. “If she does something unwillingly, then she didn’t do it.”

“Bold words,” and the whisper turns mocking. “You claim to have done things unwillingly. You tell such heart-rending stories! You’re a good storyteller, but as for telling the truth -- you do a very bad job of it, don’t you?”

If he doesn’t blink when his hands are suddenly covered in bright warm red, it’s only because this is what he sees in his nightmares: himself standing in a ring of the dead. Dead by his hand, by his gun, by his teeth and his claws.

“She knows what I mean,” he says, trying to rally.

“And yet you know she’ll turn away from you when she understands. I’ve a list of the dead, your dead, and it is longer than you are tall.”

“I never said I was a good person.” He remembers standing on that grassy lawn, with the rain already hanging heavy in the late-afternoon sky, threatening to wash out his first sight, his first glimpse, of the woman who went about in her mourning clothes, without the gloves that everyone else wore, her cameo the only spot of light that he could see. He remembers telling her something similar, something even blunter.

He remembers looking after her, looking at the spot where she turned a corner and disappeared from his sight, feeling as though she had tied a string around him with her carefully-considered words -- a string that tied him tight to her hands.

And now he looks at her, or the shape of her in this world, with a leering shadow-voice speaking through her.

Courage, he thinks, courage like the others have given him, completely unlooked-for.

Still, it’s not like he can’t feel.

So if there are tears in his eyes as he raises his revolver and aims straight for Jyn’s bared throat, he doesn’t let them weaken his resolve.

In response the shadow makes Jyn walk forward, one more step and then she’s right in front of him, and the muzzle of his gun is pressing into her pale skin.

Cassian grits his teeth.

Cocks the gun.

Keeps his eyes on Jyn.

“I’m warning you,” he says, trying to be defiant.

“You wouldn’t,” the shadow sneers.

“Like you said: I’m already something terrible. This won’t make much of a difference.”

He doesn’t feel any courage at all, and it is a terrible, wooden thing, to force his hand to move purely through the knowledge ground into his muscles and sinews and bones, as ingrained into him as the specks of black powder on his wrists -- 

“Cassian,” says a small voice.

Jyn’s real voice.

He makes himself look into her eyes.

Green makes a dazzling reappearance -- but only for a breath, only for a moment.

The green is swallowed up again in the black.

But in that very instant he can see her forgiveness, see the courage of her.

The only thing to do is borrow that courage -- just a little, just for now -- 

He touches the trigger, and by increments it moves, closer and closer to that terrible moment of flash and blast and recoil -- 

“No!”

He would fall flat on his face with the sudden shocking force of that cry -- but it’s not him falling, it’s _Jyn_ , falling like a puppet loosed from her strings.

The lamps in the foyer flare up again, stunning brilliance.

By sheer instinct Cassian de-cocks the gun and sets it safely aside, together with his sword. Lunges forward to gather Jyn into his arms. 

Shallow breaths. Slowly, slowly, threads of color and life coming back into her cheek. 

There is still an indent at her throat where he had pressed the gun to her skin, where the shadow had pressed her into his gun.

Helplessly, he kisses that indent. Hides his eyes in Jyn’s skin. “Wake up, please.”

Weight in his hair, softly tangling.

And the whisper that he knows, that he listens for. “It’s me.”

He doesn’t look up. “Tell me you’re all right.”

“Perhaps I will be. But now I am content where I am.”

He pulls away, sudden enough to almost leave him light-headed.

“No, please,” Jyn begins.

Her arms winding around his shoulders and his neck.

Her forehead against his.

“Thank you,” she says.

“You asked me if I could do this,” he mutters. “You asked me, the first time we met -- and I said it would be a criminal thing to do, to extinguish someone like you.”

“And yet you had the courage to do it.” Nothing of reproach in her voice at all. “You knew that you could do what you needed to do.” Her hands, gentle on his. “You knew it was for the greater good.”

“It would be no good world to live in, were you to be destroyed,” he mutters, and the relief finally sinks in, and he isn’t thinking when he kisses her fingertips, all ten of them, one after the other.

“Now that you know,” and he does lift his head to look at her -- to see the soul behind the green eyes. “Now that you know -- can you do it again? Can you follow through?”

He doesn’t hesitate. He nods. “Yes, I would.” There is a lump in his throat, around which he has to force the next words. “And mourn you afterwards, all the rest of my days. You know that. You have to know that. You have to know why.”

“I do,” she says, simply.

And the tears fall from his eyes like relief, like a wound being cleansed.

*

He knows the sound of the house settling in, its own form of resting in the short cold hours before dawn: he knows the shiver in the front staircase and the sigh in the ceiling above his bed. He knows the curling hum of water in the pipes -- Bodhi, likely, once again suffering the after-effects of too much tea -- and the quiet tread of Sir Chirrut walking through the rooms, inspecting, safeguarding.

What he’s hearing now is an unfamiliar sound, in an unfamiliar room -- 

_Unfamiliar room --_

His hand falls to one of his knives and he springs up, and his feet sink into the blue-and-white of the carpet, into the trailing edges of a gingham bedspread in checked black-and-gray -- that bedspread is heaving, is twisting, and that can only mean one thing -- 

Rising moan, rising tears -- 

No time to be gentle. The faster he moves, the more effective he can be -- 

He grasps two of the meeting edges of the gingham and braces his feet -- yanks, upwards, towards him -- 

That which was tangled in the bedspread falls off the opposite edge of the bed.

Silence, after the thump.

And Cassian vaults over the sheets in their disarray, and whispers, “I’m sorry, truly.”

“No need to apologize.” Breathless, disheveled: but there is no moan in Jyn’s shaken voice. Tearstains on her cheeks are all that’s left of the nightmare. “I told you to do just this.”

“I still protest the need for it,” he says, as he pulls her close, as she turns her head so her cheek is resting over his heart.

“My needs,” Jyn mutters, “outweigh your concern. In this case.”

“In this case,” he agrees, reluctantly.

If he could pull her closer, he would.

He rearranges the duster that he is still wearing so that she can pull some of its edges around her worn frame.

He can feel her, trembling, like a flame and like a bird, but not trapped against him, not when her arms are wrapped around his waist with her strange unyielding strength.

The strands of her loose hair leave the scents of the sea, and of lemons, and of charred hardwood on his fingers.

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep fighting,” he thinks he hears her say, and he feels the chill of fear on his skin, clammy, piercing.

“Do you need it?” he asks. He makes himself ask.

“Yes.”

He fumbles in the innermost pocket of his duster. Takes care not to brush up against the folded cloth and the silver within. Silver bullets are harmful, and he knows this from shooting others, and he knows this from taking one in the knee. 

The gloves, though, are his last and only treasure. A parting gift, and a final gift, from his mother.

The sight of those large gloves on Jyn’s hands breaks his heart a little more.

“I don’t see the blood on my hands when I’m wearing this,” she says, presently.

Whereas he wears the gloves so he can’t get blood on his hands. So he can’t get burned by the silver he carries around with him as a last resort.

“I feel a little stronger when I’m wearing these,” she says, and he watches her trace the lingering colors on the gloves, the last traces of the patterns that used to be on the material, long-gone reds and browns.

“I would ask you to keep them, did I have no need of them myself,” Cassian says.

“Yes, I know I must return these to you. But while I have them, while you don’t need them -- can I do this? Will you let me?”

He looks up just in time: Jyn is moving closer, till he can feel her every breath, warm slow gusts against his mouth.

“Let me,” she says again.

“You know I’ll say yes,” he whispers.

“And you know why I ask every time.”

“I know you intend no insult,” and now he’s fed up with words that cannot truly encompass what he feels, so he brushes his fingers against her cheek, down to the angle of her jaw, and he closes her eyes.

Pulls her across that final slip of space -- 

He hears her breathe out his name, and something inside him shatters, and he means to be gentle but he can’t -- he won’t, not with his heart suddenly so full, and so suffused with her -- she gasps, and he pauses, makes himself wait her out -- only to hear her moan against him, far too close, and she leans even more into him and he’s lost.

He kisses the bitter salt of her tears off her mouth.

He lets her sink her hands into his hair.

Kissing is like pure molten sensation that thrills through him, a raging river, a furious tempest, and all he can do is feel her. Her mouth and her hands, and the yearning press of her body against his.

And still he remembers: so he breathes his unspoken regrets and his spoken promise against her, and lets her slow down, slow down the kiss, slow down until they find a natural end, and then she’s pulling away from him.

He misses her mouth immediately, but now he can look into her eyes again.

“I would go to the ends of the earth for this to be -- what I want,” Jyn says.

“And I would go into hell for you,” he says.

She had protested that, once.

Now she just brushes her lips against his damp cheek.

“There has to be a way,” Jyn says. “No matter how risky or dangerous, there has to be a way.”

“I would be suspicious of the easy way,” he mutters.

That makes her laugh, a little. “Yes.”

“We’ll find it,” he says. “I can’t make any promises but that, that I can believe in.”

“Your faith might save me,” she says.

He lays a finger across her lips in response. “No. I have faith in you. But you will save yourself. One way or another.”

Her wide wide eyes.

The fragile strength of her kiss.

“One way or another.”

**Author's Note:**

> Music to write by: [Ethan's Waltz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7daTaJePXGk).
> 
> Let me know if you think this merits a 'verse of its own? :D
> 
> Look me up on tumblr [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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